


the heart verse

by orphan_account



Category: Glee RPF
Genre: Angst, Infidelity, M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-06
Updated: 2013-06-09
Packaged: 2017-12-14 03:09:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/832018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I have a question that will piss you off,” Darren states, eyes still closed, voice still private and soft. “Do you two hold each other like this?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. any of those things

**Author's Note:**

> this started out as "what if Chris was dating Will but went to one of Darren's shows anyway?" then somehow grew a life of its own and will now be split into parts. \o/

“No, seriously!” Darren’s almost shouting, showing all his teeth, still covered in sweat and obviously high off finishing his performance. His grip is strong where he’s got a hold of Chris’ hand, but he’s trembling. “This is like, the best part. Not really. But  _really_  - you have to see it, Chris, it’s part of the experience!”

Chris, laughing too loudly and smiling too wide, can only follow Darren as he leads him, quasi-spastically, to his tour bus, then inside the door into a surprisingly narrow space.

Chris wrinkles his nose immediately, playfully. “Smells like a band.”

Darren doesn’t look fazed, bright smile still stuck in place on his face. “That might just be me, dude, you know how I get.” He makes an aborted movement that Chris could swear was about to be him pulling off his black v-neck, and he’s grateful Darren doesn’t go through with it. Already he’s starting to fear how truly small the tour bus is, how sensitive he is to the smell of Darren’s body next to him. He’s not sure he could handle any more bare skin than what’s already on display.

“C’mon,” Darren says, clear and stark against Chris’ muddled thoughts. “Lemmee give you a tour. Of the…” He blinks. “A tour. Of the tour bus. A  tour bus tour.” He grins when Chris bursts out in a little chuckle, both of them taking a few seconds to just be, to just laugh. “A bus tour of the tour bus.” Darren barks another laugh.

“I don’t think you’d be able to fit another bus in here,” Chris says seriously, then they devolve into giggles again.

They spend most of their time talking. And what’s amazing to Chris is how they don’t talk about anything he doesn’t want to talk about. There are none of the expected accusations, none of the awkward pauses and replacements. Truly, they don’t talk about their (now more separated) private lives at all. They lean on bedposts and drink Diet Cokes and laugh about the cinnamon challenge and the new _Iron Man_  movie and whether the ruffle of fur around a scottie dog’s mouth is considered facial hair.

It’s relaxing - and something inside of Chris jolts when he realizes how that’s the way it’s  _always_  been with Darren. Relaxing. Natural. Easy as breathing. He’d been so caught up in - in having A Relationship that he’d almost forgotten what it was like to have a  _friendship_.

He’s musing a little on this, Darren cheerfully telling a story across from him (though really the bus is so small their feet are touching, and Chris is trying not to think about that) when he very abruptly stops and looks over at Chris where he’s sat down on the edge of one of the beds.

“What?” Chris asks, picking absently at the seam of his skinny jeans on his thigh.

Darren looks almost owlish when he says nothing, just stands there abnormally still and breathes, eyes wide open. Finally, his gaze softens. “That’s my bed.”

Chris can’t help the way heat rolls hard and heavy down over his skin. He can feel a blush forming on his cheeks and tries to redirect his thoughts. There’s absolutely no reason the thought of Darren’s bed should have him so embarrassed. “Um. Oh,” he offers, and the longer he thinks about it the more he realizes there’s really no other way to respond to what Darren’s said. It was a quirky thing to point out in the first place, and now he can’t seem to get back into the exclusively friendly mindset he fell so effortlessly into before.

“You can… do you want me to, um - ” Chris tries, and he hates the way his stomach twists excitedly as Darren nears him. “I can - “

“Don’t,” Darren says quietly, more a request than an order. His smile seems smaller now, more private. He reaches to put his mostly empty soda can under the bed so neither of them kick it, then he plops easily down next to Chris, the mattress dipping even further to the edge.

Chris sighs, because he knows what’s coming. “I mean,” he starts, heart hammering wildly and making him feel lightheaded, slow-moving. “I don’t want to like, impose - “

“Chris, come on,” Darren wheedles. And Chris shudders again at how close he is, how it doesn’t seem to take any effort for Darren to whisper in his ear like he is - he’s just the perfect height, fits just perfectly there.

And that’s the thought that ultimately undoes him, and he sighs and backs up on the bed until he can turn around, stretch out on his back. It’s almost impossible to ignore how the whole thing smells like Darren, smells like sweat and sleep and lazy, comfortable mornings. His body relaxes into it automatically, almost by muscle memory. Every time he breathes in all he can think about is when he used to pull Darren’s beanie off his head and wear it himself, pressing kisses to his beaten-down curls and just  _living_  in that happy little space, bracketed by Darren on one side and Darren’s hat on the other.

Darren of the present - Darren in front of him who’d probably  _let_  him do any of those things but won’t ask for them, can’t because that’s not how they work anymore - he simply smiles and turns on the bed as well, settling on his belly with one arm draped across Chris’ chest, head pillowed in the crook of Chris’ collarbone. He stretches out just once, like he’s preening, then calms.

It’s so familiar, so easy to slip back into, and Chris has his arm around Darren’s broad back before he really understands what he’s doing. He lets his eyes fall shut, trying to ignore the screaming in his brain of how this isn’t  _friendly_ , this is  _so much more_  than friendly, so much more he’s  _fucked_.

They stay quiet like that for a bit, eyes closed because they never need to see to talk like this, Darren’s thumb rubbing happy circles into Chris’ left pec over his shirt.

“I have a question that will piss you off,” Darren states, eyes still closed, voice still private and soft.

Chris huffs a little laugh, chest hitching Darren’s head up. “Okay,” he allows, knows how Darren works and knows it’s probably something he needs to hear whether he wants to or not. Darren’s always been observant that way.

“Do you two hold each other like this?” he asks.

“Darren - ” Chris starts, then stops, taking in a slow breath and forcing his heart to calm down again from where it’d spiked into overdrive in just a few seconds.

“I know,” Darren says, and he sounds a little sad. He presses a whisper-soft (but so,  _so_  obvious it hurts) kiss to Chris’ chest. “I just… I’m just wondering.”

“Umm,” Chris says, and he sighs, more deeply than he’d intended to. “We don’t really - I mean. No. We don’t really do that,” he says softly, and it doesn’t feel like a betrayal. He actually feels more honest for it, a little less weight on his shoulders like Darren’s steadily roving thumb is massaging it out of him.

“You don’t cuddle?” Darren asks again, but there’s something in his voice that makes Chris think there’s a joke there somewhere.

“No, loser.” Chris prods Darren between his shoulderblades with his pointer, and Darren grumps the way he’d expected. “There are other things to do besides cuddling, you know.” And Darren chuckles softly at that.

“But like, cuddling’s the best part of like… being a human being, man.”

Chris grins, a breathy little snicker squeezing out between his teeth, because that’s just…  _of course_  something Darren would think and say. Of course it is.

“I’m serious!” Darren argues, but he’s smiling too, eyes open and surprisingly demure with affection in a way Chris hadn’t expected to hit him so directly in the heart. “The best thing about having all these…  _limbs_  - ” and he flops his top arm and leg around a little for emphasis, Chris flushing all over when his leg lands more snugly around his waist and doesn’t move away - “is that you can wrap them around other people.”

And he just sounds so -  _sure of himself_ , like he has some kind of PhD in  _cuddling_ , that Chris starts laughing outright, the soft hover from before hardening again but not losing any of its intimacy. Darren laughs with him, but instead of just standing there the way they had before, the laughter makes Darren cuddle up to him, cling to him for real and dig his face into the hot space under Chris’ jaw.

“Dar - Darren,” Chris says suddenly, feeling too hot and too cold, the smile slipping so fast of his face that his body misses it before it catches up to his brain.

And Darren isn’t smiling anymore either, his face oddly relaxed, but he doesn’t say anything, either. Doesn’t move, just holds tightly to Chris but doesn’t force the point that - okay, yes, it’s - kind of exactly what Chris needs.

Chris presses a kiss to the crown of Darren’s head, knows the pressure will be unmistakable and knows Darren will knows exactly what it was. They spend another minute in comfortable, naked silence - existing together in a way that’s always been easy for them, understanding one another on too many levels to explain aloud.

“We went to go visit his parents,” Chris says, but his voice betrays him. It sounds more like a desperate conviction, like a confession, than it does a talisman of his other (and he’s already saying  _other_ , not  _only_ , which hits him in the throat a little bit) relationship.

“Did you ask them for their blessing?” Darren asks, and it sounds so - patently ridiculous for some reason Chris can’t put words to that he laughs.

“No,” he says firmly, then bites his lip because maybe he was a little  _too_ firm. Shouldn’t that be something he’s thinking about? Isn’t he supposed to be a man happily in love, thinking of levels of a relationship?

All of a sudden he feels like a child, playing an adult in a kindergarten version of a play. He doesn’t want to think about any of that, doesn’t feel like he should have to. All he wants is -

His grip tightens on Darren, and Darren adjusts, lists closer to him with no fuss at all.

“Then it doesn’t matter to me,” he says seriously, and Chris sighs, the ghost of a smile on his face.

“I didn’t think it would,” Chris says. What he doesn’t say is  _yeah, me neither._


	2. we were a disaster

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter mostly has to do with a breakdown of darren's, and m/ia plays a large part in that. i'm sorry if that will bother you. all i can do is promise you guys that i have a story to tell. trust me, yeah? <3
> 
> this picks up directly where AOTT left off.

The tour, despite the kind of desperate roar of Darren's strung-out heart, continues more or less as normal after that. He and Chris, after a few minutes, make a mutual (and, if he has anything to say about it, erroneous) decision that cuddling on Darren's itty bus bunk is childish and - more importantly - that they should stand up before they fall asleep.

The not-nap of the thing leaves Darren floaty and disoriented for the rest of the night, like when Chris had clapped him on the shoulder and told him he'd see him in New York - he can't even remember what he'd said. He frets about it the whole night after that, the movement of the bus under him making his head fuzzy. He wonders wildly at about 4:50 AM whether or not puking would clear his head and almost goes for it, stomach lurching sideways with the monotonous movement of the bus.

The next day is a blur; the systematic cracking of their bags against the walls, some mindless diddling on his guitar that Darren does still lying down, feet flat on the bottom of Theo's bunk above him, the chatter that all feels muted, yelling through water - everything strung messily together by his overtired mind.

His bed still smells like Chris.

Somewhere between scrolling lifelessly on his phone and laying his cheek on Joe's shoulder in the middle of a conversation, he starts to realize that the sleepless nights are taking their toll.

He doesn't care. Can't care. If he cares he'll lose it.

So he doesn't. He grows more restless and irritated and sits on it the way he knows Chris would tut at him for, would use as an invitation to sit him down and hold him from behind, kissing the curls at the back of his head and coaxing the stress out of him a little bit at a time.

The lights go out and come up, the venue pulsing with noise and light and Darren's already sweating, can feel the brush of the mic against his bottom lip. He'll always wonder if that, those four seconds before he went out that night, could classify as a panic attack, but he blinks, tries not to think about it. Pushes it away. He swings the microphone cord out behind him.

_Thank you, Indianapolis!_

•

Darren's in his dressing room when his phone sounds with a text, and he's got his drenched shirt hanging off his pointer when he reaches for it with his free hand. The drop of his heart would be comedic if it wasn't so tragic. His stomach clenches up, hard, and he can't stop the way he feels his naked heartbeat in his throat.

**From: Ricky  
** _Been talking to mia shes in IN. Just said shed be at the show. Dont be a moron._

Something about it strikes him, makes him carefully lower his shirt to the ground and watch it wrinkle into a tiny pile. He realizes dimly that he's shaking and everything hits him like a freight train after that, an internal tantrum that consists mostly of  _no no no wait no wait waitwaitWAIT_ because if there's one thing he's doggedly unprepared for, it's this.

He wonders madly who flew her out here, if she asked to come or if they merely paid her way and set her free.

He wonders if Chris knows she's here, then immediately wants to bang his head on the vanity until it bleeds.  _Chris has better things to do than troll the internet_  - and that thought just makes him sicker. He feels the nausea from the early hours of the morning roar up with a vengeance, and is candidly relieved that he hadn't eaten much during the day.

Darren straightens up on the seat in front of the vanity and takes a look at himself in the mirror, bare chest still slick with sweat. He thinks absently that the mic and cord hanging on his bare skin looks kind of badass, but that doesn't hold his attention for long. He closes his eyes against the pressure in his head.

_There must have been a reason. Something. She's here for some reason, Ricky needed her here. If he needed her, I needed her. He knows what he's doing._

_It's not a big deal._

He stands up, ignoring the twinge in his thighs, and grabs for his clean shirt - a worn, pastel v-neck that has always reminded him of Chris.

•

"You look homeless," Mia teases, eyes squinted over where her smile is pushing her cheekbones up. She plucks playfully at where Darren's hair has grown out, hanging down his neck. Darren doesn't particularly like it, never really knows what these kinds of little touches mean to her, but he doesn't pull away.

"Hey, Mia," he greets instead, flashing a horrible smile that's really, hardly a smile. He feels like his blood is pounding against his skin. Like he's still on stage, like he's asleep with Chris, Chris who's in Florida or somewhere,  _fuck -_  like he's anywhere but standing here in this hallway talking to Mia under the sudden cacophony of whitenoise. He feels worse than the time someone convinced him to try Salvia in college and he'd thought he was a bookshelf, on the verge of tipping and spilling out everywhere.

"You were great," she says, and his heart softens for her a little bit. She never asked for any of this - at least, not in the beginning. He can't even begin to imagine what's going through her head now. "I'm glad I came."

Like it had even crossed her mind to decline. Had it? Had it crossed Chris' to show?

Darren shakes his head, half modesty and half desperation. He can't focus. "Thanks. I'm - " Fuck. He  _is_  glad she came, but at the same time... "Uhh. Yeah, I'm. Glad you were here. Means a lot." He pulls another close-mouthed smile, hands contritely stuffed into the pockets of his jeans. Mia adjusts her scarf. For some bizarre reason, he feels like his entire body has broken out in a fresh sweat.  _What does she know?_

"I'm gonna be staying in town for a couple of days," she starts, and Darren smiles wider, mostly out of a paralyzing desire to make her feel like she's made the right decision. Despite not knowing that himself. "I told Corey I'd be here to help strike if he needed it, but he insisted I find another way to entertain myself." She shrugs and Darren feels it in his bones. The idea that he's 'entertaining her' circles in his head, pulls him in two directions - more than that, too many for him to keep track of.

Somewhere along the line, he feels something in him shut down. Too many days on the road, the road still not long enough to break him out of his funk. Too many people, not enough people he wants to talk to, not enough people who are just willing to see him as a guy, as a human being. And Mia, somehow - she's different, but at the same time not. She's somehow the most confusing whirlwind of mixed feelings and open-ended breakups and  _knowing too much about him_  that he can't even begin to figure out what to do about her.

So Darren does the only thing he can think of to do anymore. He sleeps with her.

•

Darren wakes up on a sharp inhale, adrenaline pushing the sleep out of his body in a way he knows will keep him on edge all day. There's a brief, harebrained moment of muted panic as he tries to remember where he is.

"Hi," Mia greets quietly, flushed and soft around the edges. Her thumb and pointer are poised just away from Darren's face, and he foggily puts two and two together to realize her pinching his cheek was what had woken him up.

His cheek. Resting, if squashed, against the smooth skin of her prominent collarbone. He blinks owlishly and it takes him a minute to realize his head is turned on top of her so he's looking down her body, more or less directly at her breasts.

"Morning," he manages, and he lifts his head up despite the ache in his neck. He holds it up on his own for all of four seconds before a headache sets in, and he lowers himself back down, head the right way around on her chest, now. It's - weird. Different. And the weirdness only intensifies when he curls his arm more tightly around her stomach and it hits him that he's exactly where he had been with Chris the day before.

Despite how firm he'd been the night before when they'd fallen asleep, desperate to prove himself, sure he could fuck himself normal - despite all his carefully thought-through plans to hold her through the night, somehow in his sleep he ended up curled into her side, needing to be held.

Darren feels like a child. He feels like a  _wreck_. Ricky's text circles in his stuffy head;  _Don't be a moron_. Well.

A few more dusty pieces fall into place on the puzzle he's imprinted in his skull; there are enough pieces that the full picture is obvious, but every little piece he finds only makes it clearer, harder to ignore. He keeps filling it in without meaning to, making it so big he can't look away from it. He has yet to find any edge pieces, the boundaries of whatever this is still unclear and dangerous.

The need to be held. The strange but almost reverent need to not look too directly at her breasts. The cautious, throat-eating fear that he'd been too rough, gone too fast, somehow messed something up without knowing about it.

One piece after another. Too many all at once. Distantly, he wants to vomit.

He doesn't mean to, but he gulps, obvious against her smooth skin. He wonders if she can tell what he's thinking. He wonders if she knows he's thinking at all. Can she tell? Is she curious? Is she going to ask?

Chris would ask. Would've asked. Would he still?

Mia is quiet above him, but he fears looking up. He wonders absently if she thinks he's fallen back to sleep, and his eyelashes flutter since he's thinking about them.

"You were thrashing in your sleep," Mia whispers, and Darren's eyes flash open again. He realizes he has no grasp on what time it is, and blearily turns his head to see the old alarm clock on the bedside table. He doesn't know what to say. It's three in the morning.

"Sorry if I woke you up," he offers, genuinely sheepish. It feels strange to apologize to her out loud. He still doesn't look up to her face.

"It's fine," she replies, voice voice gentle. Darren says nothing.

Some stretch of minutes later, he feels her edge just a little closer to him. At first he's nervous, but he relaxes when he realizes that her breathing is too even for that to have been conscious. Rather than thinking about the implications of that, worrying about how attached she really is to him despite the bids for attention and the weird possessive attitude; rather than break down again and tentatively support her through whatever's going on that she's not telling him about; rather than doing  _any_  of that, Darren instead decides to make one of the most cowardly, disrespectful, avoidant moves he's possibly ever made in his entire life.

He slips easily out from under her arm, pulls the sheet over her chest, and takes only about twenty seconds to trip into pants before he slips out the door.

Thankfully the open hallway under the crummy little motel overhang is deserted, and Darren silently thanks his new habit of waking up at absurd points of the night. He quietly brings the door closed with one hand, and adjusts his cock (annoyingly somewhat-hard but slowly catching up to him) in his pants with the other, carefully doing up the zipper.

When he shows up on the bus twenty minutes later, there are the expected catcalls, but he waves them away under the guise of being tired. Jack laughs the hardest at that, then pats him on the back.

"Who was she?" he asks. "Do you know?" Darren's insides twist up at the fact that Ricky hadn't contacted any of them, hadn't told anyone else that Mia was even going to be present, and he makes a spontaneous decision to keep that secret.

"Doesn't matter," he answers, and means it.

•

_And if I take one more step, I'll forget the rivers we crossed - our happy ending will be lost if we say goodbye._

"Oy, Darren." He looks up from his position on his bunk, elbows out and hands behind his head. He's certain he still looks rumpled and distracted from when he realized there was still a hint of Chris' scent clinging to the worn sheets.

Theo's leaned against the opposite bottom bunk (not his, but Molly had vacated it earlier to help Corey muck with some bent props), acoustic guitar on his lap.

"What do you want, Samwise?" Darren grumps, then laughs when he gets a rubber band slingshot to the hip.

"Pull no punches, Frodo," Theo retorts, absently cracking his neck. He gestures vaguely, and Darren watches through his peripheral vision. "I just wanna run the thing."

"Which thing? We have a couple of things."

"A couple, yes." Darren offers a fart noise with his tongue that Theo ignores. "No, I wanted to work Once Upon."

_Of course_. "You really wanna do that to me? You know how I get after that song." He doesn't mention how much more the song stings currently than it did when he wrote it.

Theo thumps his fingers on the body of his guitar a little bit, beating out a simple rhythm. "So? We've got like, two hundred miles to Chicago, you'll be out of your artist funk by then."

Darren side-eyes Theo, who stops drumming.

"It's a hundred and six miles to Chicago," Darren starts softly. Theo grins at him.

"We've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes - "

"It's dark - and we're wearing sunglasses - "

" _Hit it_!" They both call, then erupt into laughter, Darren's bedsprings squeaking under his quaking body.

"God, what a great movie," Darren wheezes. The genuine smile on his face makes his cheeks sore.

"I have to admit I've always wanted to say that," Theo agrees. "Any of that."

The bus shifts, suddenly, knocking Theo briefly onto his side on the floor. Darren barks a laugh.

"Hey, tweakers!" Tyler calls from the front, and that only makes Darren's waning snickering return in full, snorting glory. "It's like a hundred and seventy! But good effort!"

"Tyler's my crazy, explosive-trained ex-fiancé," Darren says quietly, and is pleased when a laugh bubbles up out of Theo's throat.

"Heard that," Tyler says from the front of the bus.

"Alright, alright - c'mon," Theo says, standing shakily only to plop down properly on Molly's bunk. "Sit up, man."

Darren's good mood fizzles out. "Yeah, okay."

_But what about the way our faith wasn't fiction - it was real to you, it was real to me -_

•

A gaggle of Starkids show up in Chicago, and Darren is immediately aware that they're exactly what he needed. They meet up with him before he dresses for the show, and he can only feel distantly guilty that the VIP process will start late.

Lauren's the first one he sees, so he practically gallops down a hallway and barrels into her for a hug. She greets him with a customary grab at his ass, and all feels right with the world.

It's just Lauren and Brian at first, but they assure him they brought a whole group, and that they'll see him afterwards when he doesn't have "legions of adoring fans to address." The goodbyes are reluctant but brief.

Before he knows it he's drenched in his own sweat, swinging through the first half of his set. He waits, humbled, for the cheering and laughter and applause to die down, plucking out an unaffiliated melody for the interim. _  
_

"So, this song... I mean, I do a different song at the time for every show, you know. And I was thinking..." Someone whoops in the audience, and he feels his lip twitch.  _Argh_. "I know this is a song a lot of you have probably heard on the radio recently... but I kinda like it, you know?"

He can feel his heart in his throat, and not just because it's so damn hot under the lights. He feels like the calm movements of his body on the outside are slicing him up on the inside, like everything in him is jumping and crashing into everything else. He feels crazy - crazier by the fact that he simply makes himself keep talking.

"I think there's this kind of... association with pop music - that it's all really shallow and meaningless, but I think... I think just because something's popular, that doesn't have to mean it's any less... special, or meaningful." The crowd cheers in front of him again, and he grins, swaying in front of the mic.

"And with that, this is a cover of, umm. When I was Your Man. Bruno Mars."


End file.
